Battle with oranges - level 2

Every year, people from an Italian town dress up in costumes and throw oranges at each other. It could be seen as a bad use of fruit, but it is a tradition.

The battle commemorates the people’s fight with a local, evil lord. A girl once refused to do what the lord wanted and she cut off his head. The oranges represent the head of the bad man.

In the past, people only held parades to commemorate the death of the tyrant. But in the 1930s, local girls started to throw oranges at the boys. The boys threw things back at them, and it became a tradition and later the Battle of the Oranges.